Differential access for publicly-posted composite documents with multiple workflow participants

• Authors: Helen Y. Balinsky;Steven J. Simske
• Venue: Proceedings of the 10th ACM symposium on Document engineering
• Year: 2010

A novel mechanism for providing and enforcing differential access control for publicly-posted composite documents is proposed. The concept of a document is rapidly changing: individual file-based, traditional formats can no longer accommodate the required mixture of differently formatted parts: individual images, video/audio clips, PowerPoint presentations, html-pages, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, pdf files, etc. Multi-part composite documents are created and managed in complex workflows, with participants including external consultants, partners and customers distributed across the globe, with many no longer contained within one monolithic secure environment. Distributed over non-secure channels, these documents carry different types of sensitive information: examples include (a) an enterprise pricing strategy for new products, (b) employees' personal records, (c) government intelligence, and (d) individual medical records. A central server solution is often hard or impossible to create and maintain for ad-hoc workflows. Thus, the documents are often circulated between workflow participants over traditional, low security e-mails, placed on shared drives, or exchanged using CD/DVD or USB. The situation is more complicated when multiple workflow participants need to contribute to various parts of such a document with different access levels: for example, full editing rights, read-only, reading of some parts only, etc., for different users. We propose a full scale differential access control approach, enabling public posting of composite documents, to address these concerns.